Side-Channel Attack “Binoculars” Exploits Interactions Between HW Page Walk Operations & Other Memory Operations


New technical paper titled "Binoculars: Contention-Based Side-Channel Attacks Exploiting the Page Walker" was presented by researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Tel Aviv University at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston in August 2022. Abstract: "Microarchitectural side channels are a pressing security threat. These channels are created when programs modulate hardw... » read more

Every Walk’s A Hit: Making Page Walks Single-Access Cache Hits


As memory capacity has outstripped TLB coverage, large data applications suffer from frequent page table walks. We investigate two complementary techniques for addressing this cost: reducing the number of accesses required and reducing the latency of each access. The first approach is accomplished by opportunistically "flattening" the page table: merging two levels of traditional 4 KB p... » read more